Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/37

Rh the upper stream of the Great Yangtse, known there to the Mongols as the Murui-ussu or Winding Water. In this region, uninhabited by man, wild animals abound; wolves, argali or wild sheep, antelopes of various sorts, and above all the wild yak, are found in vast numbers. These last our traveller estimates to exist in millions; strange, if it be true, that such a vast amount of flesh can derive nourishment and growth from those bleak and scanty pastures. For the individual animal also is of enormous bulk, an old male reaching to a weight of 1,600 lbs., measuring six feet to the hump, and eleven feet in length without the tail.

Their guns thus provided them with animal food in abundance, supplemented only with barley-meal and brick-tea. But their camels were utterly worn out and their funds exhausted, and thus within less than a month's journey of Lhassa they were compelled, with bitter regret, to turn their backs on that almost unvisited city. And the same causes compelled the travellers to leave unattempted an expedition to the mysterious Lob-nor, though the way was open, and a guide procurable.

Retracing their steps over the plains of Tsaidam and the Koko-nor, they again devoted some weeks of spring to extending their zoological collections in the moist region of the Kansuh mountains; and then, after much toil and suffering in crossing the desert tract of Ala-shan, they again reached Din-yuan-ing, where their pockets, not too soon, were replenished by a remittance from General Vlangali, at Peking. So worn and ragged were they, that as they entered the town the Mongols bestowed on them what Prejevalsky evidently regards as one of the most opprobrious of epithets; they called them 'the very image of Mongols'!

Whilst sending out their camels for three weeks' grazing, they renewed their zoological explorations of the